Shop Direct is to deploy ATG’s e-Commerce Suite across all its brands and websites, in a bid to deliver faster and more agile web applications to customers.

Shop Direct’s nine existing brands —  including Littlewoods, Littlewoods Direct, Littlewoods Ireland, Additions, Marshall Ward, Kays Choice, Great Universal and Empire plus, possibly, Woolworths — will all be served by one unified ATG plaftorm.

“ATG partners Conchango and Spindrift are working to build and deliver the sites using ATG’s state-of-the-art ecommerce technology,” says ATG.

The deployment is part of the company’s pledge to move away from paper-based catalogues in order to meet its objective of being 70% online by 2010. To date, Shop Direct had been relying on a largely custom-built ecommerce platform and says it now wants a solution that will allow it to innovate with greater speed and provide business users with greater flexibility.

“Shop Direct has three key objectives that its ecommerce strategy will have a pivotal role in achieving,” explained Neal Preece, the firm’s ecommerce director. “Firstly, to create a step-change customer experience, secondly to add more personalisation to our sites so that offers are targeted effectively and customers have a more streamlined online shopping experience. Lastly, we also want to add Web 2.0 technology to enable customers to personalise their own content to the site such as photos and reviews, or even ‘shop with a friend’.”

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